Washington Irving's Sketch Book [antikvár]

FOREWORD.The Sketch Book was the first literary work by an American to win international fame. Before it was published in England, in 1820, Europeaiis had assumed that inhabitants of the former colony on the other side ofthe Atlantic were for the most part savages, traders, and frontiersmen, too busy building their new raw nation to acquire the culture and gracenot to mention leisureneeded to write well. But Washington Irving's collection of essays and stories changed all that. Here was a book that Englishmen as well as Americans could loveand did; as did Frenchmen and Germans and Spaniards and readers of the many other languages into which the work was sooner or later translated.No one could have been more surprised than Irving himself by the reception that greeted his achievement. For ten years during the prime of his life he had written nothing. In the course of the11